Now Is Not the Time to Panic(29)

What Zeke and I couldn’t figure out exactly, though we were still putting up posters with the same regularity, was how the whole town was continually papered over with what we had made. People were also just spray-painting bits of the incantation, or trying to re-create the hands, the paint dripping down, looking more like cow udders. I tried to consider which teenagers in Coalfield would be weird enough to do all this, what burnouts or druggies or goths or jokesters would be willing to perform such a feat, but I started to think that maybe it didn’t matter who you were. Maybe it was just like any strange, zeitgeisty experience. You saw it was happening and either you resisted it (or blasted someone in the face with a shotgun) or you let it overtake you. And either way, whatever you did, it kept going, for as long as it wanted. And I hoped it would be forever.

We were eating corn dogs in my car, parked at the Sonic Drive-In, where the carhops wore roller skates and brought the food to your car on trays. Brian, who was a fry cook there, said the hot dogs were good because they fried them twice. Zeke paid for all of it. I was running lower than usual on funds because I hadn’t been taking as many babysitting jobs, but Zeke simply told his mom how much he wanted that day, and she would produce the money without question.

“Are you guys rich?” I asked him. I knew he went to private school, but that only spoke of a wealth that was beyond me. He considered the question.

“I mean, I think so? Yes. I, like, wasn’t sure when I was in Memphis, but now that I’m here this summer, in Coalfield? You know, looking around? I’m pretty sure we’re rich.”

Zeke was the kind of rich that I could tolerate, someone who didn’t seem to know what that money could do for him. Maybe at a private school in Memphis, your mom a violin prodigy, the levels of wealth and privilege were such that it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. All that mattered to me, besides the fact that he could buy me four corn dogs if I asked, was that if things really got bad, if we got caught, his money might get us out of a jam.

As we drank our Ocean Waters, these horrible and wonderful blue coconut sodas served in an insulated cup so huge that if you drank all of it at once, you would fall into a coma from the sugar, Zeke and I talked about what we always talked about, trying to remember little bits of our past, trying to adequately explain ourselves to another person. I told him about my stocking that we hung up at Christmas, how the triplets’ had little nutcrackers on them, blue and red and green, but mine was this angel who looked dead, its eyes closed and hands folded over its heart. Zeke told me about a mouse that he’d found in the backyard when he was six, injured by a stray cat, and how he’d kept it in his room and tried to feed it, until his mom found it dead under his pillow the next day. It was like, we had covered the big narratives, the ways our families had fallen apart, how we felt so different from everyone else, how desperately we wanted to make something important, and what was left was the actual stuff that mattered, that one night I’d had a nightmare and stumbled into the triplets’ room and asked all three of them to let me sleep with them until Charlie, finally, let me crawl into his little twin bed. How in the morning, Andrew and Brian made fun of Charlie, and how he had slammed their heads together like Moe in the Three Stooges, and how I felt charmed by this, the first time my brothers’ violence felt sweet to me.

And once we’d exhausted those stories for the present moment, wanting to space them out, hold on to them, we talked about the posters. “I was thinking about this last night,” Zeke said. “Like, even if we stopped at this point, what would it matter?”

“It would matter a ton,” I said, “to me.”

“No, I know. I know that,” he replied. He shook his head, trying to figure out what he meant. “I mean, what would it matter to the rest of the world? Other people are already doing it. Like, it will either keep going or stop no matter what we do.”

“Well, okay, maybe.”

“No, I think it’s good, right? Like, we can keep doing it, and it’s okay if we keep doing it, and even if bad stuff happens, it’s not like we could stop it now.”

“That’s kind of philosophical,” I said.

“Maybe,” he admitted.

“I don’t know anything about philosophy,” I told him, “so I don’t know if it’s sound reasoning or not.”

“Maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better because that guy died,” he said. And I knew this was coming. The first time I’d seen him after the news about Lyle came out, he had emphatically stated that he did not want to talk about it. And, selfishly, I had hoped maybe we would never have to talk about it.

“Oh, Zeke,” I whispered.

He was quiet for a second. He took another bite of his corn dog. “We killed that guy, Frankie. I mean, we were a part of it, for sure. I don’t care what you say, I know it’s true.”

“Well, yeah, we played a part in it. If we didn’t exist, Lyle would probably still be alive.”

“No, it doesn’t have to be if we didn’t exist, Frankie. You know, right? The big thing was that we made the poster. If we hadn’t made the poster, he would still be alive.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I know. But, it’s not just us. If his sister hadn’t gotten hurt. If she’d recovered. If those idiots hadn’t lied about being abducted by Satan worshippers. If the news hadn’t talked about it.”